IP Democracy: Albrecht is Out and Time Warner Gets Just Desserts

This year’s big cable confab in Las Vegas was a very odd duck indeed. I’ve been going to the show for years and years and lately, over the past three or four years, it’s been a pretty predictable event.

Not this year. For one thing, a bomb exploded Monday morning in the basement of the Luxor hotel, where many of the show’s attendees were staying (me included, but I didn’t notice the ensuing ruckus — helicopters and cops everywhere, I’m told.)

But the most surreal development took place the day before. HBO’s CEO Chris Albrecht, widely credited with fueling the creative engine that has pulled the network to the peak of critical acclaim, was busted and temporarily jailed for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend in public. This bizarre event was the talk of the show, an unfortunate bit of timing because the cable industry, more than most businesses, relies on its annual convention for self-congratulation, public promotion of accomplishments and all-around pride.

In the press room, at receptions, during elaborate dinners hosted by cable networks, everybody was talking about it but nobody knew the details, which are now leaking out. Albrecht, it seems, grabbed his girlfriend by her neck and tried to drag her to the entrance of the MGM Grand hotel in the wee hours of Sunday morning following the record-breaking pay-per-view Mayweather-de la Hoya fight hosted by HBO.

Albrecht’s explanation was that the woman “pissed me off” and the officers had to physically wrest the man away from her. In an effort to smooth out the shock, Albrecht subsequently took a leave of absence blaming relapsed alcoholism for his behavior.

But, and here’s the point of this post, The Los Angeles Times discovered that Time Warner paid $400,000 to $500,000 to another woman assaulted by Albrecht back in 1991, an incident kept quiet for 16 years, during which Albrecht rose through the ranks of HBO to become its top man. Faced with public awareness of this earlier payout, Time Warner had no choice but to fire Albrecht.

My question is: why did Time Warner allow a known batterer, one that had already cost the company a purported $500,000 in hush money, to stick around for so long? Granted, Albrecht was a valued executive in terms of making HBO the prestigious money-maker it became. But did no one, including current Time Warner President Jeff Bewkes, who was the head of HBO at the time of the payout, question the wisdom of keeping a batterer, the lowest form of person in society, in the decision-making ranks of the company?

Apparently not. What they did instead was enable Albrecht to dodge the consequences of his behavior and the upshot is the sorry situation Time Warner finds itself in today. They swept everything under the rug.

I wonder if the situation would be the same if Albrecht had assaulted a male, say, a fellow executive, back in 1991. I sincerely doubt it. He would have been tossed out on his ear lickety-split. But because he assaulted a woman, Time Warner executives decided to dole out cash rather than get rid of a liability. That’s sad and sickening.

Albrecht’s ouster is occurring a time of vulnerability for HBO. That lodestar of TV artistry, The Sopranos, is coming to an end and the network is casting about to regain its footing as the leader in high-quality, intelligent and thoughtful entertainment.

If HBO stumbles and falls because it has lost its bearings, Bewkes and Time Warner Chairman CEO Dick Parsons and all the other leaders at Time Warner who, in essence, condoned Albrecht’s battering, have nobody but themselves to blame. Albrecht is a beast, or so it seems, but Bewkes and Parsons and everybody else who matters have seemingly been protecting him all these years.

Posted by Cynthia Brumfield on May 10, 2007 11:02 AM to IP Democracy